Daily Archive

I saw this interesting article in the Atlanta Constitution about a Korean American woman who is investing in the black community.

Suna Om is a Korean immigrant and entrepreneur who is investing in the Pittsburgh community of Atlanta.  She also lives there.

“We want to be part of the West End and live together in harmony,” said Om to the Atlantic Constitution. 

Many in the community see Om as being a trailblazer as well as a good business woman.   Her next project is to build a Marriott in her neighborhood with a rooftop garden.  She sees the hotel as a great place to stay for parents of students at Clark, Morehouse and Spelman.

To read more of this article go to this link.

It’s hard for H. Clinton’s supporters to get across the point that people are more sexist than racist when everytime they send someone out to bring it home their remarks inevitably come out sounding more racist than gender neutralizing.  B. Clinton did it and alienated black voters February.  When Ferraro did it people realized what really brings her to white sales.

So how can you get across the notion that it’s hard out here for a white chick when Three 6 Mafia isn’t offering to make you a theme song? 

How you ask?  Get a black guy to do it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson on New American Media argues that H. Clinton’s biggest drawback is her gender.  In pointing out that Americans are more likely to laugh at a joke about women as opposed to one about minorities he concludes that the country is more sexist than racist.

The worst part of this is that if anyone dared make a racial crack about Barack Obama they’d be pounded into the sand. Yet, blatant sexist and anti-woman remarks are routinely spewed out, often unchallenged, and even cackled at. In the CBS News poll, though more said they have heard more racist cracks in the past few months than sexist cracks, they were less likely to be offended by the sexist ones than the racist ones.

I guess Hutchinson didn’t see the new CBS poll that they released last week on Apr 7 where they asked voters if the race of candidate mattered.  Although whites who said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who was white were outnumbered 6 to 1 by those who said race didn’t matter, those who used race as their guide ”were three times likelier to say they would only be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee than if Obama were chosen”. 

Although most white pollster’s said that gender was not a factor, for those that did consider gender H. Clinton got the slight edge.

For African Americans only one in three said race was significant in their decision.

BET founder Bob Johnson believes that Obama’s garners black votes only because he’s black.  Picking up where Geraldine Ferraro left off last month, Johnson backs Ferraro’s statements and claims that the Obama “campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything”.

“What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote?” Johnson said. “And the answer is, probably not.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s statements on disenchanted poor whites who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” has been called by both Clinton and McCain as elitist (which is funny since the Clintons have earned a tenth of a billion in the near decade since leaving the White House and McCain is one of the richest men in congress because of his wife’s money).  But really, it’s exactly to those anti-immigrant, gun-slinging people that the Clintons have been coquettishly been pandering to for the last few months by playing into their fear of a black President.

Wasn’t she something of the bitter one a few weeks ago because she couldn’t be femme enough for others to be misogynistic?  Well now Obama is looking blacker than ever, just ask the two black guys who keep pointing it out.

Well, Debra, is Obama black enough for you now?

Two seconds after we gained our freedom, pseudo social psychologists have been studying what is wrong with African Americans, why aren’t we succeeding, why are Asians surpassing us, why are our graduation rates so low, why are our families fractured?  In essence, what is it about African Americans that make us implode?

They claimed we lived in seperate but equal societies and long have we languished under the so-called parity.

So here we are in the first decade of a new millennium and the burden of the past is still beside us.  The greater of us tries to figure out how to help the least of us without capsizing the shaky boat called middle class stability in America.  First Bill Cosby critiques our woes which is then dispatched by Michael Eric Dyson whose comments are then scrutinized by Juan Williams just in time for all of us to go to the big pep rally for African American at the State of the Black Union with Tavis Smiley.   In the interim more African American males are heading off to jail than college, drugs and crime rule inner city black neighborhoods and we are at a loss to why the up and coming generation probably won’t surpass the previous one.  We look at race and class and it’s historical aspects and among the bickering we still can’t find a consensus.

In the meantime whites have moved past the issue of slavery and race. 

Meeting David Wilson is a documentary that addresses the issues of race and intraracial problems in the United States.  28 year-old journalist David Wilson goes in search of answers to America’s racial problems by sifting through his own family history.  Along the way he encounters another David Wilson whose family owned his ancestors.

It aired on MSNBC on April 11 but the DVD is for sale for all who want to watch this journey.